Half-Masked

There are three unavoidable things in life:

-Taxes
-Death
-and articles about how awesome cartoon show theme music used to be.

This won’t be a top 10 list. We’re all sick of those. But when discussing theme songs about transforming dinosaurs that shoot lasers at skeleton monsters, one must give props to the classics. “Transformers”. “Jem”. “The Raccoons”. The eighties had no short supply of kickass cartoon openings.

But for my money, the renaissance started to kick in with the full swing of the 90’s. We had Batman: The Animated Series aping the music from the Tim Burton movie. The American “Digimon” theme. X-Men the Animated Series. Iggy Pop’s “Monster Men” for the show “Space Goofs”. Many of the “Steven Spielberg presents…” cartoons as well, like Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and Freakazoid all had catchy opening numbers. Cybersix. If you haven’t heard any of those, get your butt on down to Youtube. You’ve got some catching up to do.

Disney might have the best track record for cartoon theme songs. Even if the quality of the show immediately after the songs were about as entertaining as a root canal. A root canal by a goat farmer who refuses to wash his hands. From the House of Mouse we got the theme songs to “Duck Tales”, “Tale Spin”, “Bonkers!”, “Gummi Bears” and fucking “Gargoyles”. I think to consider yourself a musical success, you need only compose half that many boss theme songs in your time on planet Earth.

It occurs to me(after much more thought than is healthy) that perhaps no theme song, cartoon or otherwise, is more instantly recognizable than that of a certain cartoon theme song. Can you guess which one?

My favourite theme song comes courtesy of Doctor Who, but Cracked.com pointed out that you can’t go into any random location with people, start the first few notes of the Doctor Who theme and have everyone be on the same page. There are starving children in Africa who have never heard of a television, and they know this theme by heart. It has become tattooed on our musical subconscious.

That is why, if ever our planet is called upon to represent itself among other space-faring species, in some Intergalactic United Nations, I nominate this song to be our planet’s anthem.

Kids would be more than happy to go to school, if they had to sing THAT every morning, their hands pressed to their little hearts. That is how you start the day, goddamn it. That is how you get kids to take an interest in learning, and it’s good to show pride for your space rock.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.